The Sales Japan Series

By: Dr. Greg Story
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  • Summary

  • The vast majority of salespeople are just pitching the features of their solutions and doing it the hard way. They are throwing mud up against the wall and hoping it will stick. Hope by the way is not much of a strategy. They do it this way because they are untrained. Even if their company won't invest in training for them, this podcast provides hundreds of episodes with information, insights and techniques all based on solid real world experience selling in Japan. Trying to work it out by yourself is possible but why take the slow and difficult route to sales success? Tap into the structure, methodologies, tips and techniques needed to be successful in sales in Japan. In addition to the podcast the best selling book Japan Sales Mastery and its Japanese translation Za Eigyo are also available as well.
    Copyright 2022
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Economics Management
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Episodes
  • Sell With Passion

    Sell With Passion
    Jan 7 2025
    We often hear that people buy on emotion and justify with logic. The strange thing is where is this emotion coming from? Most Japanese salespeople speak in a very dry, grey, logical fashion expecting to convince the buyer to hand over their dough. I am a salesperson but as the President of my company, also a buyer of goods and services. I have been living in Japan this third time, continuously since 1992. In all of that time I am struggling to recall any Japanese salesperson who spoke with emotion about their offer. It is always low energy, low impact talking, talking, talking all the time. There are no questions and just a massive download of information delivered in a monotone delivery. As salespeople, our job is to join the conversation going on in the mind of the buyer. But it is also more than that. The buyer’s mental meandering won’t necessarily have the degree of passion we need for them to make a purchasing decision. So we have to influence the course of that internal conversation they are having. This is where our own passion comes in. I always thought Japanese people were unemotional before I moved to Japan the first time in 1979. The ones I had met in business in Australia were very reserved and quite self contained. They seemed very logical and detail oriented. After I moved here I realised I had the wrong information. Japanese people are very emotional in business. This is related closely to trust. Once they trust you, they have made an emotional investment to keep using you. No one likes to make a mistake or fail and the best way to avoid that is to deal with people you can trust. How do you know you can trust them? There is some track record of reliability there, that tells you the person or company you are dealing with is a known quantity that will act predictably and correctly every time. The problem with this approach though is that you will only ever be able to sell to existing accounts. What about gaining new customers? You have no track record and no predictability as yet. When you meet a new customer they are mentally sizing you up, asking themselves “can I trust you?”. Naturally a good way to overcome the lack of track record is to create one. Offer a sample order or something for free. This takes the risk out of the equation for the person you are dealing with. To get involved with a new supplier means they have to sell the idea to their boss, who has to sell it to their boss, on up the line. No one wants to take the blame if it all goes south. A free or small trial order is a great risk containment tactic and makes it easy for all the parties concerned to participate in the experiment. The other success ingredient is passion for your product or service. When the buyer feels that passion, it is contagious and they are more likely to give you a try to at least see if there is some value to continue working with you. When he was in his mid-twenties, my Japanese father-in-law started a business in Nagoya and needed to get clients. He targeted a particular company and every morning he would stand in front of the President’s house and bow as he was leaving by car for the office. After two weeks of this, the President sent one of his people to talk to him to see why he was there every day bowing when the President left for work. When he heard that my father-in-law wanted to supply his company with curtain products, he told him to see one of his subordinates in his office to discuss it. That company eventually became a huge buyer and established my father-in-law’s business. Was that a logical decision, just because some unknown character is hanging around your house everyday like a stalker? No it was an emotional decision. What my father-in-law was showing the President was his passion, belief, commitment, discipline, patience, seriousness, earnestness and guts. That is a pretty good line-up for a new supplier in order to be given a chance. We need to remember that buyers are wanting to know our level of belief in what we are selling. The way we express that is through our passion and commitment to the relationship and the product or service we supply. Is our demeanour showing enough passion, without it seeming fake or contrived? Do we have enough faith in what we are selling, that it naturally pours out of the pores of our skin? Are we painting strong enough word pictures to get the buyer emotionally involved in a future involving what we sell? Audit your own levels of passion when you are in front of the buyer. Do you sound sold on your own offer? Do you sound committed to go the extra mile? Do you sound confident and assured, showing no hesitation? Are you honest about what is possible and what is not possible? Always understand that buyers, whether for themselves or for the company, buy on emotion and justify it with logic. Make sure you can supply that emotional requirement as ...
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    13 mins
  • How To Handle “We Are Happy With Our Current Supplier” Pushback

    How To Handle “We Are Happy With Our Current Supplier” Pushback
    Dec 24 2024
    Japan loves the Devil they know over the Angel they don’t know. Change here is hard to achieve in any field, because of the inbuilt fear of mistakes and failure. This country takes risk aversion to the highest heights in business. There are no rewards for salaried employees to take risk. There are massive career downsides though, if things go wrong, due to an initiative they introduced. Personal accountability is not very popular here. The decision-making system here is also a nightmare in this regard. Who is the decision-maker? Probably no single person. The meeting we attend may have one to three people present in the room, but they are the tip of the iceberg. An iceberg we will never get to meet by the way. Behind the walls of the office, sit their other colleagues who will have to sign off and agree on the change. The checks and balances of Japanese organisations guarantee a few things. One is it makes for good communication internally. No one faces an unpleasant surprise. I have found most Japanese, as individuals, are not good at dealing with the unexpected. The sudden emergence of something that had not been previously factored in, has these staff rushing for emergency exits in fear. The other thing this system supplies is the opportunity for all the vested interests to have their say. Fast action is not viewed as a plus. Reaching a consensus is very important in Japan and people expect to have input into any new arrangements. The piece of paper suggesting the change physically moves around the section head’s desks and each one applies their hanko or stamp to the document, indicating they are okay with the change. Nothing will happen until all of those stamps are there. Turning up and finding the buying team are already quite happy with their current supplier, means a lot of work has to be done internally by the people we are meeting, to make a change away from the known and established order. Who wants more work? No one in Japan, that is for sure. When you are dealing with small to middle size firms the supplier arrangements can be even trickier. They often have a strong owner running the show. They make a lot of the key decisions and then everyone else does the execution of the decision. You may not get to meet with the dictator directly. In many cases, the current supplier company was supplying their grandfather who started the business. Many a good time was had on the golf course, being entertained in the Ginza by geisha and visiting expensive cabaret clubs together in the good old days. Gifts flowed thick and fast as well, to cement the relationship. The current generation of the heads of the respective businesses may have been at school together, have marriage links between their two families or belong to special clubs as members. I see these connections at my very exclusive Rotary Club here in Tokyo. These are successful families who move in the same circles. The third generation of family business heads have deep links together built up over the last generations. Why would they change their trusted supplier to you? Be it a big corporate or a smaller concern, there are a lot of barriers to change in supplier relationships in Japan. Frankly, we have few levers at our disposal as a result. The one thing that companies fear in common though is getting left behind by their competitors. The globalisation of business has meant these harmonious relationships between supplier and buyer are getting shaken up. Just explaining the details, benefits, quality and pricing advantage of the solution you provide are not enough. We need to lob some dynamite into their current cozy little supplier arrangements, by bringing up their exposure to being blindsided by a competitor. We need to remind them that the best solution will win in the market or at least reduce their market share. We need to point out that in a competitive industry, no one cares about the depth of the existing relationships, because they are fully focused on their survival. Rivals will make key supplier changes and these will trigger changes across the industry, as everyone else has to adjust accordingly. By getting ahead of the curve, they can win time to adjust and win market share for themselves, vis-à-vis their rivals. Price and quality differentials only become meaningful in this light in the current market. Just talking about price or quality in isolation won’t move the buyers to make any changes. The effort to make new or change supplier arrangements needs a strong reason in Japan or else everyone just defaults to a “do nothing” stance. This requires we come armed with examples of where a change in supplier arrangements wiped certain companies out. The best option is relating changes in their industry, but even if we don’t have that, we need to show evidence of how dangerous it can be to avoid change. The drivers of change ...
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    17 mins
  • 416 Mastering Referrals. How to Ask Without Feeling Pushy

    416 Mastering Referrals. How to Ask Without Feeling Pushy
    Dec 17 2024
    I have been in sales since 1988, with a slow, then fast migration of skills. I started my own small one-man consultancy in 1988 in Brisbane to assist businesses wanting to create revenues with Japan. I moved into commercial real estate in 1989, then into market entry in 1992, retail banking in 2003 and then selling soft skills training in 2010. I began my personal study of sales around 1990. The company didn’t provide any sales training, so I had to source it myself. I attended Tom Hopkins two-day Sales Seminar in Brisbane and that considerably boosted my understanding. The organisation I worked for in Japan brought in a sales trainer and I worked with him as his assistant for delivering sales training through N.E. Asia. When I joined Dale Carnegie I undertook the sales training they had and that further refined my skills to the point where I was able to certify as a sales trainer. If there is one area I see as a weakness in myself and for most people in sales it is asking for referrals. Japan shouldn’t make any difference when it comes to asking for referrals so I don’t think there is an market specificity preventing us from doing it. I had an uncomfortable experience when someone supplying me with personal services did a hard sell to me on referring him to other potential buyers. I had bought from him a few times, so there was a relationship there, but I always felt a bit wary about him. He is clearly focused on the money and fair enough, but I shouldn’t be feeling that. So when he pushed me hard on getting new business from him I didn’t like it at all. It felt dirty and unnecessary. Why do I owe him anything and have to introduce my contacts to him to grow his business. What had he ever done for me to grow my business - a big fat zero? He presumed that because I was a client, he had the right to ask me for referrals, but I didn’t feel he had won that right at all. So where is the line where we can comfortably ask the buyer for introductions to other people to get new business? I think the personal relationship is important, but they don’t have to be your bosom buddy in order to ask. Of course, if that is the case then it is easier. Firstly, we have to have built the trust with the buyer by delivering value for them. I try to make the buyers my friends, but that doesn’t happen in every case. The buyer becoming a friend shouldn’t be part of the qualifying process to be to ask for a referral. As long as we have delivered value we have a starting point. The way of asking is critical. The person I referred to, asked me in an extremely aggressive way and I didn’t like that at all. One of my failings is if people become aggressive with me, I instantly respond in kind. As I get older though, I am getting better at dealing with this flaw and when he was aggressive with me I didn’t say anything, so that is progress. The takeaway for me was never ask for a referral in an aggressive to too assertive fashion. Keep in mind the buyer doesn’t owe us anything. We need to remind them of the value we have provided. With this platform we can ask for their help. We should never ask a very broad request such as , “Do you know anyone who would benefit from our training?”. We have just opened the floor gates for them and they have so many possibilities they can’t fix on any that are helpful. It is like those consumer experiments where counterintuitively they have found reducing the number of choices on the shelves helps to move more product. We need to zero in on some choices for them to make from a limited number of people. We can say, “You have mentioned to me that you felt you received value from the training we provided. I wonder amongst your circle of family, friends, colleagues or business contacts, you can think of someone who would equally get value?”. We have reduced the entire Universe of people down to four buckets. We want them to be able to see the faces ion their minds eye so that the process is controllable. If they are struggling then we zero in on one of the buckets to see if we can spark some recognition of who might benefit. If they have someone on mind, we have to make the follow-up super easy and a light touch for them. If we ask them to call that person for us, while we feel this is perfect, they will feel that is too much. After all, they don’t work for us. However, if we say, “would you mind if I mentioned that we did some training with you and you thought they might also benefit from the same training?”. That is a light touch and easy for them to agree to. We might also ask them for the contact details of the person they have in mind and again that is an easy ask. We can copy them in on the email if we send an email and then that tells the person we are contacting that we have permission to make contact. If we do it by phone then we need to drop the name of the person who gave us the ...
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    14 mins

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